Katie-Jo Glover, a pretty, tattooed veterinary assistant, has her hands full as a multi-hued five-inch black-capped Caique bird named Gaughin squeals and flies around the waiting room with abandon. It almost looks like a scene right out of “Animal Practice,” NBC’s highly-promoted new show that centers on a zany New York City animal hospital, full of implausible office romances, wildly unrealistic medical scenarios, and, of course, an irrepressible Capuchin monkey running around in a lab coat.

But for Glover, 26, it’s just another work day for her and the three vets and eight other staffers at the Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine Hospital on the Upper West Side, which purports to be the only exotic animal hospital in the city. While the bird flying about the waiting room is reminiscent of the workplace antics on “Animal Practice,” little else at the real-life animal practice is. Life does not imitate art — or network sitcoms. “There is no monkey with a little white coat,” says Glover.

The hospital does house a number of exotic animals — both patients and healthy office pets — including a fire-bellied toad, a hedgehog, foxes, snakes, pot-bellied pigs, African gray parrots, rescued pigeons, chinchillas, guinea pigs, and turtles.

The facilities are clean and modern, but they’re not nearly as fancy as what you see on TV. “We have no foosball table, no enormous surgical observation theatre, no spacious offices,” gripes the hospital’s no-nonsense manager and nurse Lorelei Tibbetts. She’s watched two episodes of “Animal Practice,” and, like Glover, found the show wildly unrealistic, from the hospital environs to the goofy characters’ laissez faire attitude about surgical hygiene. “Our days are full of appointments, difficult situations, long hours, no lunch breaks and tight quarters,” she says.

Dr. Alex Wilson, 36, and a vet of eight years, dealt with one such difficult situation on a recent Friday. An animal rescue group brought in a sweet but severely injured rabbit named Skittles who was found abandoned on the street. Wilson performed a hysterectomy on the poor little bunny; in the coming weeks she’ll likely have to amputate Skittles’ broken hind leg. “It’s sad,” she says, “but she’ll adjust.”

Wilson estimates that the hospital averages one surgery a day — from spaying a pot-bellied pig to tumor removal on a hamster — leaving little time for the office poker games seen on the show. “It’s borderline making a mockery of what we do!” she exclaims.

That’s not to say life at the real-life vet hospital isn’t entertaining. Tibbetts says they’ve been approached by several reality TV companies to do a show, and she’s open to it. “It would be fun,” she says. “There have been moments when the craziest stuff happens — s – – t will squirt in my face!”